The question of allowing women to attend the debates has long presented difficulties to the parliamentary mind, though at one time it was not unusual to see lady visitors actually sitting in the Chamber itself side by side with their husbands and friends. "Ought females to be admitted?" asked Jeremy Bentham, many years ago, unhesitatingly answering his own question in the negative a moment later. To remove them from an assembly where tranquil reason ought alone to reign was, as he explained, to avow their influence, and should not therefore be wounding to their pride. "The seductions of eloquence and ridicule are most dangerous instruments in a political assembly," he says. "Admit females--you add new force to these seductions." In the presence of the gentler sex, Bentham suggests, everything must necessarily take an exalted tone, brilliant and tragical--"excitement and tropes would be scattered everywhere." All would be sacrificed to vanity and the display of wit, to please the ladies in the audience.[424] If the serious business of debate were to be sacrificed to "tropes," no doubt the British Constitution would be considerably endangered; but experience has taught us that the presence of ladies has not affected the debates detrimentally, and the excitement caused in the breasts of our legislators by the sight of a contingent of the fair sex is not of a kind to prove alarming. [424] "Works," vol. ii. 327. Women have taken a strong interest in political matters in England from very early days.[425] We even find them giving occasional expression to their views upon some Government measure with a violence which did not at all commend itself to the authorities. In the Journals of the House for March 5, 1606, is the following entry: "A Clamour of Women against Sir Robert Johnson, for speaking against a Bill touching Wherry-men; upon complaint of which the Commons ordered, that Notice should be given to the Justices of the Peace, to prevent and suppress such disorders."[426] What steps the Justices of the Peace took to quell this feminine clamour history does not relate. In 1675 some confusion was caused by the Speaker observing ladies in the gallery, and though a member suggested that they were not ladies at all, but merely men in fine clothes, the Speaker insisted that he had caught sight of petticoats. [425] Ladies of rank often attended the Saxon Witenagemots, and in the reigns of Henry III., Edward I., and Edward III. certain abbesses were summoned to send proxies to Parliament. (See G. B. Smith's "History," vol. i p. 11.) In the sixteenth century the right to elect a member for the rotten borough of Gatton was in the hands of a woman. See Porritt' s "Unreformed House of Commons," vol. i. p. 97. [426] "Observations, Rules, etc.," p. 162.